The disgust of thousands of classical music lovers, 20th century art music has been dominated by a complex system known as serialism.
Serial music is like spinach. People grow up hearing others complain about how terrible it is. Some people eventually try it and agree that it's horrible stuff; otheis try it and decide it's rather good. But most avoid and detest it as a result of rumor and hearsay.
There's a term for this: ignorance.
It isn't necessary to like serialism, but anyone with an interest in classical music should at least try to understand it. And to do that, it's best to begin with Austrian composer Amold Schoenberg.
Born in 1874, Schoenberg was the leader of a movement away from traditional ways of writing music.
But he began his career as a full-fledged Romantic.
He wrote the string sextet ``Transfigured Night'' in 1899 and later expanded it for string orchestra. Its perspiringly intense Romanticism is just one step beyond Wagner.
But less than a decade later, his Chamber Symphony No. 1 of 1907 caused a stir as it drifted away from traditional harmony. From that point, Schoenberg would not drift but follow a direct course into uncharted waters.
Schoenberg was a part-time painter. As a visual artist he adopted the tenets of Expressionism, which encouraged a highly subjective, often exaggerated and distorted freedom of expression within a personal, unique system.
Naturally, Schoenberg began applying Expressionist techniques to his music. By 1909, with the first piano Piece in his opus 11 collection, he found total freedom of expression by completely abandoning traditional tonality.
Tonality revolves around the retaxation or resolution of musical tension. It relies on a centuries-old system in which a piece of music may venture into distant harmonicterritory but always wends it way back to the comforting home tone of the main key.
Everything in tonal music revolves around a home note, called the tonic. That includes the key (or collection of notes) that is built upon It, and other keys that are built upon certain important notes in that key. If you ever took piano lessons, you'll remember that although 12 notes are available in any octave, when you play scales you strike only eight notes that are separated from each other by specific intervals. If you play the C major scale, for example, you ignore the black keys that separate some of the white ones.
Chromatic music, like late Wagner operas and Schoenberg's ``Transfigured Night.'' uses all 12 of those notes, but with reassuring glances back home to the tonic.
Atonal music, like Schoenberg's mature pieces, also uses any or all 12 notes freely, but does not usually revolve around a tonic note. Atonal compositions are harmonically homeless. They do not resolve musical tension, so they make a great many Bach and Tchaikovsky lovers nervous or irritable.
Atonal music easily drifts into harsh dissonance, and so can sound quite tortured. But atonality can also be mysterious or ethereal, as in some of the songs and piano pieces Schoenberg wrote around 1910 or so.
Schoenberg's next works were met with general incomprehension, especially 1912's ``Pierrot Lunaire,'' a cycle of 21 song with instrumental accompaniment. The vocalist uses Sprechstimme, a technique halfway between speech and song that glides around pitches instead of hitting them precisely.
Schoenberg began to feel that atonality wasn't a rigorous enough way to write music, so he set to work on devising what is so beloved of Germanic intellectuals, a System. Bear in mind that according to principles of Expressionism, anything was possible if it fitted into one's own system.
The Suite for Piano, op. 25, was Schoenberg's first completely 12-tone, or dodecaphonic, work. This means that virtually every aspect of the music's development was derived from a row of 12 different notes arranged in an order of the composer's choice. No note could be repeated until the other 11 in the scale had appeared.
Once the order of tones was established, that row served as the basis of the music's melodies, counterpoint and harmony.
It wasn't just the same dozen notes repeated again and again. There were three basic variations on the row - inversion, or turning the row upside down; retrograde, or playing it backward; and retrograde inversion, meaning upside down and backward.
Add to this the possibility of transposition - maintaining the basic row pattern but starting it on different notes - and the result is 48 possible permutations of the original row. Some composers followed Schoenberg's lead wholeheartedly, especially his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Igor Stravinsky also became a full-fledged dodecaphonist in his old age.
Other composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich, eventually dallied with 12-tone subjects, but did not buy into the whole retrograde-inversion system.
Twelve-tone, or dodecaphonic music, is often called serialism. But, strictly speaking, serialism is the sequel to Schoenberg's work. Beginning in the late 1940s, composers led by Pierre Boulez began applying Schoenberg's concept of the row to more than just pitch. For serialists, the basic pattern to be manipulated is determined not only by each note's pitch, but its rhythm, loudness, and timbre (which instrument is playing it).
When a tone row is turned backward, so is its rhythmic pattern. A whole note followed by an eighth note followed by a half followed by a quarter and then another eighth becomes eighth-quarter-half-eighth-whole. Every conceivable musical element is manipulated this way.
This is all a fascinating puzzle, but it makes far more sense when you can see it in print than when you can only hear it. Serial music requires extremely concentrated listening, and even then it's easy to lose its thread. Ironically, listeners often perceive serialism, the most tightly organized music yet devised, to be hopelessly chaotic.
Serialism has been the dominant compositional style in Europe and North America since the 1950s - a period during which audiences have, not coincidentally, developed a widespread revulsion to new music.
Now tonality is becoming respectable again, and the general public is developing more curiosity about new works. Serialism is losing its dominance. But in order to understand the leading style of composition in the 20th century, it's necessary to investigate the works of Schoenberg and his successors. Then, even it you still don't like it, at least you'll know why not.
Schoenberg listening suggestions
To follow the progression of Schoenberg's musical thought on compact discs, begin with his most Romantic work, ``Transfigured Night.'' Then continue with the thoroughly atonal Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16. End up with one of the dodecaphonic works, perhaps the sonorously scored Suite, op. 29.
``Transfigured Night'' and the Suite are both contained on a CBS CD conducted by Pierre Boulez. For Schoenberg's other orchestral or large ensemble works, any recording by Boulez will be highly illuminating. Chamber music lovers may trace Schoenberg's development simply by listening to his string quartets in chronological order.
These, along with quartets by Berg and Webern, are available in a tine tour-CD set on Deutsche Grammophon featuring the Lasalle Quartet.